With Chrome 49 fully rolled out to desktops, Android, and Chrome OS, version 50 is now in the beta channel. It is expected to bring Material Design to the browser and introduce improved push notifications and other developer focused features.

The biggest addition is improved push notification reliability from websites and other services. Initially, push notifications relied on service workers to proactively get data about the notification from a server. This approach is problematic when a device is on a bad Internet connection and when multiple messages are being sent.

Version 50 of Chrome switches to a new model called push notifications payloads, part of the Push API. Data on notification are now sent at the same time as the push message. To protect user privacy, notification payloads must be encrypted before they are sent. Additionally, sites will be able to detect when a user closes a notification and as such be able to close notifications sent to other devices.

Notifications in Chrome 50 will be more customizable, with sites being able to set custom time stamps and icons for buttons in notifications. Sites can also ask users whether a notification should play a sound, vibrate, or remain silent.

Chrome now supports the ability for sites to the tell the browser ahead of time what resources should be downloaded. This will cause the site to load faster, as seen in the video below. Besides other developer facing features, Chrome 50 will finally add a pause and cancel button for downloads on mobile devices.

All these features and more apply to the newest Chrome Beta on all platforms. Otherwise, they should be available in version 50 of Chrome in approximately six weeks.